Keynotes

Keynotes

Over the last three decades an extraordinary roster of authors has delivered keynotes at the annual Whiting Awards ceremony, sharing stories both rueful and celebratory of their early creative life and offering advice to emerging writers. Below you’ll find some of our favorites.

Saul Bellow 1985

People consume a diet of novelty that would have driven their ancestors into the madhouse.

Eudora Welty 1987

Pleasure is not another word for a book’s content. Pleasure, whatever its source, has to be made. It comes from the act itself of creating.

Galway Kinnell 1988

To lay words in true and beautiful order takes a heightened intensity that will allow one to break through inhibitions.